It's now been 6 days since I received notice to contact the NSW Police. And despite all attempts, I failed.

OK, email to
to customerassistance@police.nsw.gov.au, explaining the situation and asking for
help. And how about that, I got a call back from Senior Constable Adam Ginnane within an
hour, saying that he couldn't get in contact with DSC Todd, who was apparently out of the
office on another matter, but that he had spoken with a colleague, and I would get a call
back later in the day. He also gave me details of how to contact him if needed. It seems
that Joan's comments yesterday were wrong: customerassistance@police.nsw.gov.au is
in the same building as the help line I have called so many times, and they could have put
me through.

The email you received is a generic email that is automatically generated from our
computer system when we create a report. This email does not have my current contact
details of which I have no control over.

In relation to your matter, a police report has been created (Report Number- ....) and
preliminary enquiries have identified the suspect account holder as being located in the
area of Burwood NSW. As a result, your report has been transferred Burwood police station
for further investigation. Contrary to the information supplied in the email you received,
I am not the officer in charge of the matter as ACORN is an assessment centre and does not
investigate.

OK, finally. But why this completely wrong information? And the most worrying thing about
the matter is that nobody seemed to think that there was a problem.

But is that signature valid? I probably understand email better than most, but it makes no
blind bit of sense to me. In addition, there's no guarantee that the signature applies to
the attachments as well. Effectively it's useless. By contrast,
the SPF failures appear
to be incorrect configuration.

And yes, I almost think that the email really is valid. Only people as stupid as ANZ could
think up something that so closely resembles malware, but fails because of details.

People, the Internet has been with us for over 20 years. When will Big Companies grow up?

Chris Bahlo has an ancient AppleMacBook which, she says, has a defective
video display. The display is on the motherboard, and when she took it to the Apple people
in Ballarat, they told her that it was
nearly 5 years old, far too old for them to have spare parts.

I don't use the display on computers that don't run X, so that was of no problem to me, so I asked her to give it to me. She did, but there's
a problem: I can't find anything wrong with the hardware. Still, time to play around with
it.

But how do I communicate with it? Yes, it has a keyboard and a trackpad, but no buttons for
the trackpad! I confirmed that I can plug in an (old, mouldy) mouse into it and that it
recognizes both buttons, but how do I operate them on the laptop? Went looking for
instructions on http://www.apple.com/, but things like Get to know your new Mac seem
to assume that you know the answers. After much searching, I found a reference to a
Force Touch trackpad, not a
friendly name. Do I have one? How do I know? After a bit of experimentation, I found that
I probably do.

Recognition 1: to left click, press the trackpad forcibly just about anywhere.

And the right button? It has functionality, as my old mouse showed. But how do I activate
it? Press anywhere on the pad and you get a left click.

So I asked on IRC. We have at least three Appleheads, and they all contributed bits of
information. Edwin Groothuis told me that Ctrl-click simulates a right click, and
also that two fingers on the trackpad simulate a scroll wheel. Jamie Fraser said:

apparently my laptops touchpad has a right click built in (that's not pushing down in the
bottom right corner of the pad). double-tap and hold with two fingers

learn something new every day

It's not clear that he was talking about Apples, however.

Daniel O'Connor added:

tap with 2 fingers or hold control and tap with one depends on how it's configured
ctrl-tap should work by default

This one was interesting because Edwin hadn't heard of it.

In summary, then: it seems that, for religious reasons, Apple has done away with buttons,
just to spread confusion instead. Even experienced users don't know the details.

Apple Mac: the machine that you can learn (to click on) in a single day.

That was on 26 April 2016, over 18 months ago. Finally, on
31 October 2017, the camp was closed. They had only just started
building alternative accommodation, which was free but unprotected.

Where were the inmates to go? The honourable thing would have been to grant them asylum in
Australia. But no, they were turfed out onto a building site without protection from the
weather or hostile natives. The UNHCR has
called on Australia to fix things. But no, they have closed down the facility,
leaving hundreds of people in fear of their lives, staying in the remains of the camp
despite lack of water or food.

These images are at approximately 1:1 magnification (in other words, the width is about 17
mm). And yes, the mites (about 0.5 mm across) are recognizable, but none of them at all are
really sharp. What about the postprocessing alternatives? Putting the same images through
FOCUS projects
3 professional and Helicon Focus (which, I discover from the tutorial videos, is pronounced “Hīlicon”) gave me:

Once again a completely garbled output from Hīlicon. Why? The tutorials show to do exactly
what I was doing, but that this strange garbled view is an intermediate stage. Could it be
that the merging failed, but that it was too polite to tell me? In any case, that demotes
Hīlicon as long as I can find something else, especially as is wants a subscription model.
It isn't FOCUS: that still doesn't manage to merge the images in full resolution, which
basically makes it useless. Despite the good advertising, all this PROJECTS software seems to have been a waste
of money. There's also Zerene (I hate to
think how they pronounce it), which promises better, but I haven't had time to try it.

Still, I tried Hīlicon again with another stack, this time taken at f/5.6, and using the raw
images. And how about that, it produced a real image, and one that was (marginally) better:

After playing around with DxO PhotoLab on euroa, it reliably hung in about three different ways. I couldn't get it to work.
Deinstalling, both with Microsoft's standard tools and with a hastily downloaded Ashampoo
Uninstaller 6, followed by subsequent reinstallation, didn't help.

OK, time for a problem report. How do I describe it? A video clip sounds like a good idea.
OK, let's try:

What a catastrophe! It reminds me of what I tried to do with my camera 50 years ago, before
good photocopiers were available to Mere Mortals. Nowadays we'd take a screen shot, of
course.

OK, how about a video screen shot? That must be possible. Yes, indeed. A quick Google
Search found “Debut”, which is
even free.

OK, try it out, and how about that, it Just Works:

There's little comparison in the quality of the two logs. In the first case, I had
forgotten to refocus after positioning the camera, but it wasn't clear until I saw the
results how bad the framing was. And the file was enormous, 25 times the size of the
(longer) “Debut” log:

About the only issue is that the cursor movements aren't recorded, and that possibly some
popups don't display. But this one is definitely a “keeper”.

OK, time to submit the bug report? First remove the package again and see what's left.
Just about everything! Somehow Uninstaller 6, didn't help. Something, maybe
the symlinks, or maybe just the presence
of non-installed files, caused both deinstallers to fail. And Ashampoo was also not able to
remove the information, stored somewhere deep in the bowels of “Windows”, that I have another 27 days of free trial.

What a mess this Microsoft is! I'll have to make more investigation. A good thing that I
have other machines to run the software on.

Finally it has stopped raining for a while, time to mow the lawn. Got that done with
relatively little effort, but it occurred to me how little work I've done in the garden
lately. And somehow, despite Mike coming all the time, the weeds are winning. Time to get
somebody in and put in some real garden beds, rather than trying to reclaim lawn.

We have space for one, and the other will need to wait until we dig up the garden again.

After that, off to Bella Gardens
in Buninyong, really the private house
of Amber, a Facebook friend of Yvonne (as she found out on
arrival). Petra Gietz had told us about the place, and she was there helping out when we
arrived. Picked up a number of various things, including unspecified orchid
bulbs, Aquilegia,
Valerian,
thyme,
sage, a ground cover that they
call “Baby's Tears”
(interspersed with what we think
is forget-me-not), and what we
think is a Kniphofia:

It's been three years since
I first tried to take good photos of some really tiny orchid-like flowers, about 1 cm
across. They're flowering again, and now I have a camera with
built-in focus stacking. Time for
some more attempts.

First with in-camera stacking, which is what Olympus mean by the term. A
maximum of 8 shots, so my focus was limited. Here's the best of the three, taken at f/11,
but still not covering the entire flower:

OK, take a stack for external processing, which Olympus call “focus bracketing”. I had
planned to take 40 shots at f/5.6, but once again had finger trouble, and ended up with only
20. Here's the result:

That's almost as good as I would want it to be. I could have used some more shots—the tepal
at top left is becoming unsharp—but I have almost all of it in focus. And this time it's
not cropped, like the in-camera photos are. The biggest issue is the angle of view:
the anther (if that's what it is) in front
is only visible from the outside. Next time I'll need to position the camera more
carefully.

One thing of interest is the depth of field. The flower itself is sharp, but the sharpness
ends abruptly down the stem. That's to be expected due to the technique, but it creates an
effect that you can't really get any other way.

How does the Olympus
OM-D E-M1 Mark II focus stacking work? It provides you with two basic settings: “step
distance”, a number between 1 and 9, and step count. This photo gives some details:

Richard Turton has done some investigation of the meaning of “focus step”, and come up with a relationship to the
aperture for one lens, not completely coincidentally the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm
f/2.8 Macro with which I took today's photos: it's the obvious choice for this kind of
work. But in the process he introduced another parameter, “focus count”. What's that?
It's reported by the camera in the Exif data
in Makernotes tag 0x301, and
he quotes:

OK, what did I get today? For the first (closest) of the 20 images I got:

I had thought that “Focus Distance” is a value calculated by exiftool, and I've already noted
my irritation that it is only accurate to 5 mm. But it seems that it's a real tag, which
doesn't help. “Focus Step Infinity” and “Focus Step Near” don't change in the sequence, but
the count does:

The “Focus Distance” is really useless. In my 20 shot sequence I only have three values,
repeated many times. But comparing the focus steps with Richard Turton's graph is
interesting. His values are much lower than mine. “Focus Step Infinity” must be round
1,600, while for me it's nearly 5,400. Is this a function of the lens, or of the camera?
All of the photos I took today with the 60 mm have the same value, although I powered the
camera down between shots. Looking further shows that that's a coincidence. The photos I
took with this lens on 15 August
2017 show a value of 1223. Is that because they were taken with the E-M1 (Mark I)?

It was also taken with the E-M1. It's surprising that the value was exactly the same as
today.

So, a hypothesis: there are a well-defined number of focus steps between “infinity” and
near, and the real distance is dependent on focus_step_count - focus_step_infinity.
That would imply that focus_step_near - focus_step_infinity is a constant. I had
thought that the choice of focus_step_infinity was random, but it seems that it
might not be that random after all. I suppose I should go looking at more photos.

The other thing that is apparent from Turton's graphs is that his lens appears to report a
smaller value for focus_step_near - focus_step_infinity, round 10,000. My
measurements show a step count of 13,205, both for today and last September.

So “Focus Step Near” is the same in all cases, but here I have a total step count of 17,249.
Hypothesis busted. Is “Focus Step Infinity” maybe unimportant? That still doesn't explain
why Turton's “Focus Step Near” seems to be round the 11,500 mark.

That still doesn't give a transfer function for focus step to distance. If Richard Turton
is right, it could really be (intended to be) steps of equal unsharpness. I need to re-read
his article and think about it. I should also analyse the relationship between
“Focus_Step_Count” and “Focus Distance”.

Yvonne has a
tiny opal, about 1.5 cm long, which she got
from Essey Deayton, who apparently found the raw stone personally. Yvonne wanted a photo.
How hard can it be?

I failed. All the standard tricks didn't work, probably because the surface of the gem was
polished and curved. After giving up, I went looking, and found suggestions like using a
light tent. But I had already done that:

Taking the opal photos was only the first
part. Now I also had a good subject
for focus stacking. In this case,
of course, in-camera stacking works well enough, as long as you don't forget the crop, which
is significant:

I didn't even bother to try with FOCUS projects 3 professional, but I downloaded a trial version of Zerene and compared it with Helicon Focus.
The results were interesting. Helicon is much faster, round 5 times the speed, it
feels. But the results aren't quite up to scratch. Here Helicon on the left, Zerene on the
right:

That background pattern is a figment of Helicon's imagination. They're not all as bad as
that, but I consistently come across problems with Helicon's rendition, while I have had
none with Zerene. Here's another attempt, again Helicon left, and with the out-of-camera
version on the right:

There are minor differences between the first two (run the cursor
over an image to compare it with its neighbour), but they're very small. On
the whole I think I prefer the Zerene rendition, but it's not clear that this would be the
case for another image.

Other things I have noticed:

I've had a number of crashes “stopped working”s with Helicon. What caused
them? Nothing obvious, and I can't be bothered to follow up.

Zerene doesn't believe in Exif data, so
I'm going to have to re-add it myself.

All this Microsoft space stuff makes it difficult to select files, but Zerene also
forgets the current working directory. It has a “recently used folders” selection,
which almost works, but I still have to select it.

Zerene has difficulties with source images of different sizes, such as DxO PhotoLab insists on producing. It can't accept them at all. It's not clear whether Helicon can
handle this situation: last time I tried it, the same set of photos fails with “Internal
render error 5”.

Both of the packages run on a remote desktop, something very important in my
environment.

Zerene has a Linux version. I haven't checked it—I've more or less capitulated and run
most photo software on Microsoft—but it would be nice if I could get it to run under
FreeBSD.

Each package comes in three different versions, with a price range of more than 2:1.
It's really difficult to find the differences between the individual
packages—you'd think they deliberately hide them. Helicon hides it under the tab
“Licenses”, which shows that there's not really much to be gained from anything
except the “Lite” version. But that costs $30 per year, or $115 for an
unlimited license.

By contrast, Zerene has at least two different versions, priced from $39 to $289
outright purchase, and apparently (like the others) with lifetime free upgrades. The
difference? For (real) professional work (in other words, where you're making money out
of it), there's the, well, “Professional” edition, this time using the word the way it
was intended. The same version is called “Prosumer” if you're not making money out of
it, and costs $189. Then there's the “Personal” edition for $89, or $39 if you're a
student. the difference appears to be the lack of the advanced Pro-only features. One of them is (wow!) “Preserve all metadata,
including EXIF, IPTC, ...”. This would be much more convincing if it were not for the
fact that I'm test-running the “Professional” version now. Along with other equally
useless features, there are also some retouching features that may be useful.

So which do I take? It's looking very much like Zerene, since there are too many bugs in
Helicon. But is there maybe a third useful package lurking out there?

I am a police officer at Burwood Police Station in New South Wales. I have reviewed your ACORN report in relation to the issues you have had with a seller on eBAY. Unfortunately our current operating procedures are that due to not using PayPal, the recommended eBay payment option, no investigation will take place. Furthermore, the loss of $104.99 is not a sufficient loss to warrant a police investigation. The alleged offender has also reimbursed you some of the funds, which also suggests that this could be a civil matter and not suitable for the criminal court.

Just what Craig Weber said! Clearly he knows the ropes. It's sad, though, that the police
are not interested. So now I need to find how to proceed with a civil claim.

Recent trackpads on macs allow various options for right button (or as they call it "secondary click"). I use "two finger" clicks for right mouse button. It has become so natural for me, so much a part of muscle memory, that I could not remember that without sitting at my mac and seeing what I do to activate right click.

This is actually well "documented", but in a completely non-obvious place: its under settings->touchpad. There you can set how you want to activate clicks, secondary clicks etc. It even has videos to show you how to each operation (the documentation).

As you note, the scroll wheel is also replaced by scrolling with two fingers. And it works both vertically as well as horizontally, which is good when zoomed into photos etc.

You say that you suspect the touch pad had force touch touchpad. Force touch was only added in 2015, so if the mac was 5 years old it is unlikely that it is that old. The absence of buttons does not mean that the touch pad is force touch. One nice part about the force touch pads is there is no moving parts. (There is a mechanism that simulates a click feel - haptic feedback)

On a touch pad, not having to find the buttons, but just click anywhere is actually very efficient, both in usability and in space on the laptop.

That's good to know, but it shows how difficult it is to find this information without the
help of an expert.

It's a Diuris sulphurea, and not
the first I've seen in Dereel. I thought
that it was the first I've seen round Stones Road—the others were south of Kleins Road. But
checking back, no, I've seen them round here in large numbers two years ago and even on our own
property last year.

What is Unix? That depends on whom you ask.
The lawyers have always had a different viewpoint from the techies. And while it's
reasonable to say that Linux is Unix-like,
can you say that about Android Yes, it has a
Linux kernel, but the whole interface is foreign. In my book, not Unix. Similar
considerations apply to Mac
OSmacOS (barely fits my definition of “Unix”
and iOS (doesn't).

Given my definitions, it's clear that macOS is the most widespread version of Unix. Or so I
thought. Then I read this
article: Every Single Processor
that Intel has made in the last 8 or 9
years contains a hidden processor
running MINIX. The mind boggles. The
article is mainly concerned about security, but I'm more interested in the architecture,
which it doesn't describe in any detail.

I'm still annoyed about the way I've been treated regarding the matter with Craig Weber
(eBay seller klearview_au). When I get over
my anger I'll follow up. But today I was curious as to whether he was still registered with
eBay. Yes. Not only that, since then he has become a top-rated seller!

And that with the feedback I left him! Went checking what feedback he had received since
then—and mine was gone! So was another one of similar character.

Mutually withdrawn? I wasn't even informed! And I most certainly would not withdraw it.
Tried once again to contact eBay, and this time they have yet another way: call a number
(1800-322-928) and enter an 8 digit password. Did so and was ultimately connected to Steph,
who told me that she could still see the feedback. I made it clear that I expected the
feedback to be reinstated, and that I expected an explanation from the people who do these
things. She promised to follow up, and that I could expect a call back within a week at the
latest. I made it clear that if she did not, I would follow up with the Australian
authorities.

Somehow eBay seems completely chaotic. I'm left with the feeling that Craig knows how to
manipulate the system, either by an undocumented bug, personal contact or just plain
breaking and entering. High time Amazon expands into Australia. There's no reason to believe that they'll be better, but at least
I'll have a choice.

As if to confirm my opinion, while we were talking, I received email from eBay:

Dear Greg Lehey,

Thanks for calling us. Because we weren't able to authenticate you during the call, we thought the information below might help you make sure your account information is up to date.

How to check or update your postal code, address, or phone number
1. Go to My eBay.
2. Place your pointer over the 'Account' tab, and then click 'Addresses'.
3. Under 'Registration Address', click the 'Change' link to the right of the information. You will need to enter your password again to change the information.
4. Make the changes needed and confirm by clicking the 'change registration information' button.

How to check or update your credit card information
1. Go to My eBay.
2. Place your pointer over the 'Account' tab, and then click 'Personal Information.'
3. Under 'Financial Information', click 'automatic payment method'.
4. Select 'Credit Card' and then click 'Set up Automatic Payments'. You may need to click 'Continue' if you're changing your information.
5. Enter your credit card information, and then click 'Continue'. If you're adding a new credit card, you'll be asked to authorise it.

To learn more about changing account information, please visit: http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/account/change-account.html

What the hell is that about? I had no difficulties with authentication. The time matches
the beginning of my call with Steph. Did she have finger trouble?

DxO PhotoLab creates output images that can vary in size by up to about 6 pixels on a side. That's
not a big deal, much less than 1%, but it breaks various software that processes multiple
images and expects them to be exactly the same size. What I need is a program that can take
a stack and crop the larger images to the size of the smallest.

Where can I find that? I looked, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I didn't have the right
search terms. In any case, searching became more difficult than doing it myself, so I wrote
a script myself. It definitely needs
improvement—currently it crops all images, even if not necessary—but it has enabled me to do
some more work on focus stacking.

Another potential advantage of Zerene is
that there's a Linux version. Will it run on FreeBSD? Spent some time checking, and came to the answer “Yes”. The main issue
proved to be, once again, that eureka is so down-rev that I can't run modern Linux
binaries on it. But it worked almost out of the box across the LAN on lagoon. Yet
another reason to upgrade eureka.

The USA has had another mass shooting. I'm
surprised that they bother to report them any more. But there's soul-searching and
finger-pointing every time it happens. A couple of graphic representations seem to help
understand the issues. First this image from the New York Times:

So: stop gun sales? Reinterpret
the Second
Amendment to
the United States
Constitution to restrict use to the kind of arms usual at the time it was written, and
in militia-related contexts? Powerful
lobby groups are going to prevent that, at least in the short to mid term. And I don't
think that it would solve the problem, though it could possibly reduce the effects. Imagine
somebody storming into a church with a couple
of flint-lock muskets. But the real
issue is the gun mentality that pervades US society.

Call from Maggie Keenan of Domestic Buildings
Dispute Resolution Victoria today. JG
King have indeed had staff turnover, and the new manager is called Ashley Barker, who
is still trying to get his head around the issues. Good luck to him. It might be easier
for them just to give in.

We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. We’ve reset your eBay password. If you had your PayPal account linked to your eBay account, we've disabled your PayPal link to protect your funds. Any unauthorised activity, such as buying or selling, has been cancelled and any associated fees have been credited to your account. Any listings that we removed are included toward the end of this email. We assure you that your financial information is securely stored on a server and cannot be seen by anyone.

Dammit, when will they finally stop? If they have reasons, they should say so. But this
happened in April,
May and September this year alone, and possibly
on other occasions that I didn't bother to mention. What is wrong with these people? My
passwords are getting more and more insulting.

Into Ballarat today to buy stuff for the
planned trellis in the garden. First to Bunnings, where Yvonne had identified some
trellis-like dividers yesterday. But there was nothing there that I found even remotely
usable. They're really not trellises at all, more dividers for privacy, and unsuited for
climbing plants. We saw a couple that could barely have done the job, at prices that were
out of proportion to the function.

Finally we found a latticework trellis in a completely different place, after first having
to ask for prices of other equally unsuited arches. And we were ready to pay. But of the
four people at the exit, only one was manning a cash register, although there was one on the
other side:

Two weeks ago I took some
focus-stacked photos that were less than optimal. The results with the out-of-camera
stacking were surprisingly good, but limited in focus depth (only 8 component images). I
took another series of 84 images of
a Burchardia umbellata, of
which FOCUS
Projects Professional made results that I wouldn't want to use:

Due to the stack size issues, I haven't been able to get Zerene or Helicon Focus to
produce any results. But now I can normalize the sizes. What do I get? I still need
to RTFM for both products, but Zerene has
two different ways of merging the stacks (PMax and DMap), and Helicon has three (A: weighted
average, B: depth map and C: pyramid). Here are the results of each. First Zerene PMax and
DMap:

Getting results from Helicon was more difficult. Apart from the difficulty of selecting the
input images, it crashed very frequently, more than I'm prepared to accept. I must have had
20 crashes so far.
And here are the results from Helicon A (weighted average), B (depth map) and C (pyramid):

Which are better? It's difficult to be sure. Helicon results have more contrast, but
that's easily fixed. All images have a sharp background
(the Drosera). The real issues seem to
be sharpness and delineation behind the flowers, which have moved from one image to the
next.
Probably in this case the best results are from Helicon's C (pyramid) processing (run the cursor over an image to compare it with the next). There
are things that I don't (yet) understand about the process, and it's possible that once I
do, I might be able to get better results.

The sharpest image of the flowers themselves seems to be one of these two, Helicon C
(pyramid) or Zerene PMax:

At first it seems to be the first (Helicon C (pyramid)). But that's partially due to the
higher contrast, and it suffers from noticeable ghosting, while the other (Zerene PMax)
doesn't. This is also the one that kills FOCUS
Projects Professional (third image):

dischord.lemis.com, my Microsoft photo box, has 16 GB of memory, still a
comparatively large amount. But after my photo experiments today, the task manager showed
it using about 15 GB physical memory. After stopping the photo software, it dropped to 2.23
GB:

This is “Windows” 7, though I'm not too sure it would
be very different in older or newer releases. But why do programs that aren't currently in
use use so much physical memory? Is
their Virtual Memory model really
that bad? Or is this “soft” memory usage, where pages are in memory but are backed up on
disk, and can be discarded without problems?

Jamie Fraser tells me that “Windows” 10 gives more details, and yes, much of this
memory is available immediately when needed. It doesn't explain why the performance drops
off so badly when memory is so “full”, though.

How did that happen? To get to where he needed to go, he had to go over the drain area.
But unlike Ted, he stopped in the middle, with his drive wheels in the soft part of the
drain. So he tried to drive off forward again, digging his way into the ground in the
process.

He called back to base, and in another 40 minutes Adrian arrived with a truck and pulled him
out:

Yesterday I took a couple of photos with my mobile phone: I hadn't expected to need to do
so, and I had left my camera in the car. But how do I get them off the phone? I've
grumbled about the opacity of the Android user interface in
the past, but I've always managed to get them off there with a little bit of searching. But
not today. WiFi File Transfer, a program that fills in for missing basic Android functionality,
offered to find “My Photos”, “My Pictures” (what's the difference) and other Mys, but it
couldn't find them.

Neither could I. One of the problem is that this toy has no standard tools.
Where's find(1) when you need it? wifi file transfer does quite a good job of
tree-climbing, but that quickly gets boring.

So I decided to download the entire memory of the device so that I could process it
on eureka. That will be useful as a reference in future. While doing that, however, I checked some of the other tabs. “Media gallery”
found it. The photos were on the external SD card, about the only thing that gets stored
there, in the relatively logical directory http://talipon.lemis.com:1234/storage/extSdCard/DCIM/Camera/, but for some
reason wifi file transfer didn't look there. Now that I know, I can save the URL in a web
page.

And that's one of the big issues with Android: each app does its own thing, and there's no
way for another app to know what it is (though in this particular case it looks more like
lack of trying on the part of wifi file transfer). But every time I use Android, I find
something new to hate.

That report, from Digital Photography Review,
is the most informative. Their own
page is much less so, but shows some truly horrendous prices: the unit itself costs
$1,500. Even the battery charger costs $249, more than I paid for Yvonne's E-PM2 with lens. It's billed as “developer's edition”, which I translate as “solution looking
for a problem”. I have a suitable problem: I need a remote viewfinder for my camera for use
out in the open. With suitable imagination, this device could be adapted. That would
require something more flexible than OI.Share, of course.

Took a number of focus stacked images, but didn't get round to processing them.

Off also to Swansons Road, where I had found so many flowers this time last year. This time I found
almost nothing. Yes, the usual stuff, but in particular no sun orchids and
no Caleana major (duck orchids).
Found one flower that I hadn't seen before, clearly not an orchid, but the photo will have
to wait.

Spent some time today processing yesterday's focus stacks of the wildflowers. There were
slim pickings: in most cases I had managed to miscalculate the beginning or end focus point,
and I ended up with results that were just plain out of focus. I really need a
better viewfinder. One possibility would be a small normal monitor connected to
the HDMI output.

There were only two photos worth looking at. Here's
a Diuris sulphurea rendered by
Zerene (first two images) and Helicon Focus variants A (weighted average) and C (pyramid). Run the cursor over
an image to compare it with the other of the pair).

I wasn't able to get any results for Helicon B (depth map): every time I moved the mouse
towards the button, the application crashed. Yes, a reinstall might help. But sorry,
Helicon, you're just too unreliable.

Which is best? Zerene DMap has some very unpleasant artefacts in the stems on the right, so
for this subject it's not worth talking about. The two Helicon results are surprisingly
different in the background. But in general I can't find much wrong with any of them.

The other subject was this wildflower, which I've been observing for nearly a month.
Again, run the cursor over an image to compare it with the other of the pair):

All of these look acceptable to me. Again, the biggest difference is the rendering of the
out-of-focus areas, though this time Zerene PMax is the one that stands out.

This time I also took the trouble to measure processing times. My estimate of 5 times as
long for Zerene proved optimistic. For the Diuris, Helicon took 14 seconds with either
method. Zerene DMap took 138 seconds, effectively 10 times as long. But it's the result
that counts

I've decided against photos for Saturday evening dinner for a while, until I get my
technique sorted out. It's somewhat disruptive as it is, and I continually run into
trouble.

Today we had Raclette, not quite in
keeping with the weather (temperatures touched 30° today), but we've only used the new grill
once before, and it seemed
like a good idea before we knew what the weather would be like.

Once again we noted the difference in the distance between element and pans. The old grill
had so little space that it was easy to touch the element, though the pans were shallower.
With this one I'm coming to the conclusion that the distance is too great, and we need
something to lift the pans:

While taking photos of the bogged truck yesterday, I discovered some extreme vignetting when
using the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO at 12 mm. Tried again today under more
controlled conditions, with what must surely be the most boring photos I have ever taken in
earnest:

The mark in the middle is the shadow of the tripod, and is thus of no importance. This was
the raw image with no conversions, taken with a filter on the lens. Was the filter
responsible? Or is this vignetting something that is corrected in software, either in the
out-of-camera JPEG image or with external
software such as DxO PhotoLab? Tried that too, after removing the filter (which made no difference).
Here first the JPEG, then DxO results:

That required rescanning, and I spent a lot of the day doing that, in the process refining
my methods and discovering that
I had many more films in my old negative album than I thought, like these forgettable photos
from 19 February 1966:

Grilled chicken drumsticks taste good, but it's really difficult to cook them correctly.
Underdo them and the meat sticks to the joints. Overdo them and they get dry and stringy.
And measuring the temperature is difficult.

Clearly a case for sous-vide cooking.
So that's what I did yesterday, and today we grilled them. But things still aren't that
simple. What temperature? Conventional wisdom (in other words, what I have written down)
is that they should be cooked at 78°. But when I had done that, the juice coming out still
looked pinkish, so I cooked some of them for another couple of hours at 80°.

The second group (of three) was cooked to 80°, and the skin round the thin end has pulled
apart. And what difference did it make? Both sets were much juicier than conventional
cooking methods, but neither was really “falling off the bone”. Next time I'll try some at
82°.

Time to run DxO
PhotoLab on euroa again. The installation is still broken, and remained broken
after “uninstalling” it. But when I fought my way the maze of twisty
little directories folders after deinstallation, the files were still there.
OK, rm -rf /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/Local/DxO/ and reinstall.

It worked. What use are these deinstallers? OK, I had put stuff in there that hadn't been
installed, but surely they can deal with that. At the very least they can report the fact.

Got JG King's reply to my complaint today. I got the feeling
that they didn't read it, and just restated their letter I received over two years ago. They even
mentioned the bandaid to the floor levels that we had agreed on back then, and which was not
part of my complaint. About the only new thing that they seem to have come up with was the
windows: the contract specifies double glazing throughout, but some of the windows are
single-glazed. Their statement (verbatim): “This was not raised on my inspection of the
home but windows are as per contract”. And that's all. The sad thing is that this kind of
lack of attention doesn't seem to do people any harm.

It's been over 18 months since I started trying to take focus-stacked photos
of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
flowers. So far technology has always got the better of me. Today I had another go, and
finally I have a couple of photos which are almost acceptable:

I need to look at it in more detail, but I don't see any artefacts. About the only issue is
the depth of field. In each case, I took 20 shots, the first at f/4 (a little wide for this
lens) and the second at f/5.6. But the first one was further away, and I ended up with
almost the entire background sharp. The second, despite the smaller aperture, was only
barely sharp to the back of the flower. I really need to create some tools to
calculate the number of steps necessary.

On numerous occasions I've complained about the lack of an adequate viewfinder for my
cameras when taking macros. Yes, they all have at least two viewfinders, and the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I can
have three. But they're all connected to the camera body, which makes them difficult to use
in situations like these:

But the cameras have an HDMI output.
Years ago I connected my GPS
navigator to my Olympus E-30, and it worked. That was a composite input, but surely there are HDMI monitors out
there.

Went looking and opened a can of worms. The cheapest I could find had the “standard”
resolution of 800×480 and cost $56, and it seemed to do the job—until I discovered that it
did not have a battery. The cheapest with battery cost $102, and it had a resolution of
1024×600. But then there was one from Viltrox, a name I know, specifically intended for my
purpose, with flash shoe mount and sun shade. It also promises “pixel magnification” and
focus peaking, which might also be usable. By this time the price has risen to three times
the el-cheapo model, but maybe it's worth it.

Then I made the mistake of looking for reviews. Before long I had this review:

Another feature of interest is genuine 1920×1080 resolution (something that the cameras can
output). But it seems that even the battery-operated models frequently come with neither
battery nor charger. Somehow this search is getting more complicated than I thought.

Spent quite a bit more time investigating viewfinder monitors today. There's an amazing
choice. Some of the better ones seem to come from a company with the unlikely name
Feelworld, which calls them “on-camera
monitors” or “HDMI Camera Field Monitors”. But which? The current
list (probably predestined to link rot) lists no fewer than 19 different models, in
addition to 18 “SDI Field Monitors”. They differ at least in resolution and screen size.
But even after limiting to 7" diagonal and 1920×1080 resolution, I'm left with 5
different monitors, with an actual resolution of 1920×1200. Why do they use this aspect
ratio? More importantly, though, what are the differences? They don't offer a comparison.
The differences I see are availability (I've only seen two of them available on line), and
controls: some have a row of prominent control buttons, others don't.

The two that I could find are the FW760 and the FH7, with buttons, and the T7 (“New”), without buttons. What are the other differences? I don't know. The
FW760 is clearly older, but it has the buttons, and also reviews, such as this one:

That shows a number of issues:

It has focus peaking that seems to work. That might even be useful on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, which has built-in focus peaking: particularly with macros it seems to be a bit
touch-and-go.

It has “zebra stripes”, a strange way to refer to marking burnt-out highlights with a
cross hatch.

It appears to have at least two zoom functions. In combination with 1080p output, that
could be useful: the resolution is better than the camera viewfinder.

It has a built-in histogram function.

It has a battery connector, but by default it doesn't come with a battery!

The last issue is a problem, but some people are offering kits with battery and charger.
Prices in this configuration are round $230. Is it worth it? I think that it makes sense
to have 1920×1080 (or 1200) resolution, The cheapest I can find there are round $170 without
battery, from a company called Eyoyo, and the descriptions I have found haven't been very
convincing. But clearly I'm not done yet.

Recently I heard of a company called ON1, who have
just released a new version of their photo software. OK, I can try that. Fought my way
through their web site: I needed to provide my (one-off) email address before they would
talk to me, and for that I needed to tell them about myself and what kind (only one) of
photos I took.

Finally I was registered, logged in and... had to tell them all over again. My guess is
that this is a case of Hanlon's
Razor.

And they didn't think of that before? I don't mind trying out new software, but they
shouldn't make it difficult. Not only do they not check what's needed, they don't tell me
how to install it. Goodbye, ON1.

Middle of the month again, time for my monthly garden flower photos.
Last month things were
rather depressing, but things are looking a lot better now.
The Paulownia kawakamii that
had suffered so much in the frost earlier this month seems to be coming back strong. Here
two weeks ago and today:

Another plant that has taken its time is
an Anigozanthos (“Kangaroo paw”)
that the Marriotts gave us a couple of years ago, which Sasha then mutilated, and we nurtured back to
health. It's doing very well now:

I've been dragging my feet about
the Clematis plants that I bought the
weekend before last. Part of the issue is erecting the trellis, for which I have found
various grounds for procrastination. The other was the discovery that
the Mandevilla laxa that I had
wanted to replace was in fact not quite dead:

Time from Sunshine to Wendouree
(including travel time of about 1 hour): 57 hours, 49 minutes (89.3%). I would have to
assume that at least 56 hours of that time (86.6% total) were spent storing in Sunshine
West.

I've noted this before, but I never cease to be amazed. There must be some good business
reason for this, but I don't see it. Is there really that little postal traffic
between Melbourne
and Ballarat? I'd love to find a
plausible official explanation.

The package that Australia Post so lovingly
matured was a display card for teevee, my multimedia box (or TV driver). Yes, of
course it has a display card, but it's full height, and I wanted to migrate teevee to
a LenovoThinkCentre:

How do I migrate easily and with fallback? I can't even just take out the disks
from teevee and put them in the new machine (provisionally called tiwi): if
something goes wrong, I'll have to rebuild again, and I won't have the option of comparing
how they behave. In any case, there are two disks, and the ThinkCentre can only hold one.

The right way is to install a new operating system on a new disk, and use that. But that
takes time and requires configuration. Instead I got an old disk and simply overwrote it
with the contents of teevee's root file system. And how about that, it worked!

Put in the display card, which fortunately fit:

Fired up X. How about that, it worked out of the
box! And yes, I could watch TV on it. One of the most painless rebuilds I've had.

Moved it to the lounge room and connected to the TV. Yes, that worked too, including the
sensitive things like the remote control. About the only issues were files that were
dependent on the host name, like ~/.xmodmap.tiwi and ~/.xmodmap.teevee. But
all very minor.

But then I tried to watch a film, and I noted random artefacts, almost like scratches on a
film. And from time to time the TV blacked out and took a few seconds to resync.

What causes that? The obvious culprit is the TV, with which I've had fun in the past.
Connected up teevee (see, it's good to have a fallback), and things worked correctly.

X configuration? I hadn't changed it from the old
config, but surprisingly that was correct. It turned out that the new card is electrically
almost identical to the old one. The dmesg output is really identical:

What about /var/log/Xorg.0.log? Normally it's almost impossible to compare the two,
but this time there were very minor differences, mainly related to the fact that I
had inadvertently put in two sets of font specifications:

That's clearly not the problem: in fact, this works on tiwi, while teevee
doesn't appear to have the path /usr/local/bin/X11/fonts.

The most obvious issue would be differences in the frequencies of the output signal. But
not only was the output similar enough to be easy to compare, there was no significant
difference at all. About the only real difference was the fact that the old card also has a
VGA output, so there was more information about the fact that it was connected.

OK, try 3. xvidtune. Oh. Can't run it over the network. But the man page shows me
that there's a -show option, which just prints out a mode line, all that I wanted.
Try that:

What does this leave me with. Defective HDMI cable? Maybe the card has a defective HDMI
output: I tried it via DVI in the office, and it worked there. Dirty connection? The
obvious first thing would be to reseat the cable, reboot the machine, and see if the problem
still occurs. If it does, try the new card in teevee and see what happens there.

So I've decided to buy a FW760 camera (“field”) monitor. Caution is required: the standard offering comes
with neither battery, charger (obviously) nor micro HDMI cable, though there are bundles
with those “accessories”. The cheapest bundle I could find on eBay was for $225, but that was a bid, not “Buy it now”.
The cheapest “Buy it now” was from LinkDelight for $230 or “Best offer”. OK, what's a reasonable offer? Sent off an
offer for $220, which was refused. At the same time, they raised the price to $246! Sent
off a stiff comment offering $225 as last offer, and got a counter-offer of $239.

Sorry, LinkDelight, this isn't the way to delight your customers. I'd rather pay more and
buy elsewhere.

Pizza again for dinner today, although we had
it less than two weeks ago. But on Sunday Yvonne was at
Heldane's Icelandic stud on Sunday, colocated with Shaw River Buffalo Cheese: Amy Heldane
does the horses, and her sister Thea Royal does the cheese, some of the only buffalo cheese
in Australia. So of course Yvonne brought
some Mozzarella back with her:

Once again I had difficulty with the dough: I
had to add about 7% to the stated quantities. I had a similar problem last week, which I
attributed to incorrect measurements. Is this a problem with the different flour that I
hadn't noticed before?

Yesterday I took my
monthly garden flower photos,
but only today things had changed completely. We had nearly 30 mm of rain, causing
near-flooding in front of the house, despite all the precautions we had done earlier in the
spring:

The other thing that is becoming clear is that the drain from the street via the entrance
isn't ideal. On the one hand it's clear that the entrance should be wider to cater for
trailers coming round the corner, and on the other hand there's a natural drain to the left
of the driveway:

It's been nearly two weeks since we bought the new Clematis plants,
and a week since we bought
the trellis. Time to put the trellis up? Yes. And it went smoothly. The biggest problem
was untangling the plant (an Edo murasaki cultivar,
pruning group 2) without breaking off anything significant. I managed that, but we lost all
the petals on the two flowers. Still, it's in place now:

I was really upset by the way, far from accepting my “best offer” on eBay, LinkDelight increased the “Buy it now” price of the FW760 monitor from $230 to $247. But they also had one on auction, initial bid $225.
OK, wait until the end and then buy... for $225, the price they had rejected yesterday.
That feels good.

To be fair to LinkDelight, their price was probably really too low. But if you offer “Buy
it Now” and “Best Offer”, you shouldn't increase the price when people make an offer, at
least not for that one person.

Yesterday's work on tiwi.lemis.com (the new teevee) was successful but not complete. I still
needed to move disks around and put the new box in the TV cabinet.

teevee has had two disks for a remarkably short period of time. My last upgrade
started on 1 June and took
over 3 weeks to complete.
By comparison, this time was a breeze.

Last time round I added a new boot disk to teevee, leaving the old one untouched.
That proved to be useful today: I was able to copy the entire root file system to it,
greatly simplifying the transition. In fact, about the biggest problem was physically
moving the machine from its provisional position to inside the cabinet:

That also involved swapping names: the new machine became teevee, and the old one
became tiwi. Of course, in the three months' life of the previous incarnation I
accumulated something like 300 GB of content on the second disk, and I needed to move it to
the system disk. That involved some finger trouble (note: don't NFS mount a file system on the
same system). And then hours of moving files across the network. But it's working! For
the first time in the over 13 years since I started using
computers to drive TVs, I have a system that doesn't look (that) abnormal.

Although I had no real problems setting up the new teevee, there was one strange
issue. On boot I got an unexpected message:

gptboot: Invalid backup GPT header

That looks like some kind of data corruption on disk, and that's all that I found on the
web. It's benign in the sense that it doesn't stop the machine from working, but it would
be interesting to find out how to fix it.

Yes, that looks like
a Grevillea
rosmarinifolia, not a Thelymitra pauciflora. And it is, easy to recognize. At front
left, though, is a Thelymitra, and this photo is to help me locate it. The plant itself is
here:

I've been keeping an online diary for over 17 years now, following on from a paper diary
that I kept for nearly 8 years in the 1960s. In March 2009 I was informed that my
“blog” had been added to the ACM Queue blog roll. Blog? I don't have no
steenking blog. In fact, I created one to make my point.

Where does the word “blog” come from? “Weblog”, of course. Even the Oxford English Dictionary describes the term in detail,
including this reference (under weblog):

1997

J. Barger Lively New Webpage in alt.culture.www (Usenet newsgroup) 23 Dec. I
decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily
basis:..www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.

Typically, that URL is now 404.

I chose to limit my diary for ACM: much of what I do is of no interest to their readers.
And for quite some time I've been one of the most regular contributors. Looking back over
the life of the blog roll (about 8½ years), I contributed 3,280 of the total 13,628 posts,
about 24%. That's about 32 a month out of about 135 a month.

But times have changed. Today there were (so far this month) 35 posts, 28 by me. Last
month (the last complete month) there were 47 posts, 36 by me. My average hasn't changed,
but the overall average has dropped by round two thirds.

That's not just the last month or two. In June 2016 (the first month for which I can get
statistics), there were 53 posts, 30 by me. In those 18 months the other contributions have
dropped from 23 per month to 11 per month.

Where have all the bloggers gone? It seems that in this day of smart phones, typing has
become “too difficult” (for once I'm in agreement), and people prefer more ephemeral means
of communication. If Facebook isn't bad
enough, consider Snapchat, a company with a
philosophy that goes against all that I hold dear. Or, if you're a politician, there's
always Twitter to limit your output to match
your attention span.

I suppose blogs will go the way of USENET,
with archived content and very little new content. I wonder how we'll communicate in 10
years' time.

Tim Bray wrote an article yesterday days ago about the image quality of
his Pixel 2 as processed by various
software. Interesting, but not spectacular. How would a real camera have handled it?
Decided to leave a comment. But of course there was a form to fill out. Did that (“How
many sides does a triangle have?” Three, of course), and got an error message:

This also gave me another chance to take a focus stacked image, this time hand-held with 20
exposures. I can't see any evidence that Zerene had trouble with it, though it's gradually becoming clear that PMax creates
cleaner backgrounds than DMap. Here PMax, then DMap (run the cursor
over an image to compare it with its neighbour):

I'm gradually getting to the stage where my Zerene results are sufficient for most purposes. What about my older attempts? Can
it help there? My first attempts at manual focus stacking go back nearly 5 years, but on that occasion I
had to give up because my software wasn't up to it. Today I got:

That's not perfect by a long shot. It can't be: I only had two images, and there's an
intermediate area that is out of focus in both shots. But it works, and in this case
there's no significant colour or gradation difference.

Then, on 18 June 2015, I
tried to merge a series of images of
a Eucalyptus flower. By this time I
had the version 4 firmware for the Olympus OM-D E-M1, but problems
with DxO Optics
“Pro” stopped me by giving me converted images with different sizes. That's still an
issue, but now my scripts correct for it:

Another series of horse riding videos today, like the ones I took three months ago. I wasn't keen: I had
had serious focus issues last time, and I didn't know how to fix it. But Chris and
Yvonne were insistent, so out again, this time with the
Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark
II and the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, using a medium-sized focus area and
autofocus with tracking. And how about that, with one minor glitch the camera kept focus.

Or at least, it claimed to have done so. The focus system showed a green frame round one of
the horse heads that tracked perfectly. But it was lying: the image didn't stay in focus,
like here at about 1:20:

A year and a
half ago we planted five Buddleja
saplings to the south of the house. Their fate has been varied. The two at the end both
died. One did really well, and the others look like they have barely grown. Here the
westmost two:

It's difficult to recognize the small one; it's at the extreme left of the first image, and
the bottom of the second one. Why has it done so badly? My best guess is that the soil
there is really poor, and there were no nutrients. I've fixed that now, and we'll see how
(if) things improve.

Some while back I linked to some images on Wikimedia. Today I discovered that one wasn't loading. My loading mechanism
includes some JavaScript magic, so all
I saw was a “loading” message that took too long.

OK, follow the link manually. A remarkably vague error message taking up the entire height
of a 2560×1440 screen:

They shot up all over the place, and I had planned some macro photos of them. But only
today they seem to have finished flowering. Grabbed a couple and took them into the office,
where I got at least one reasonable photo:

OK, still worth photographing. But it's really not easy. I'm gradually coming to the
conclusion that the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II focus peaking fails badly with extreme macros. And how
many steps? How many times have I asked that? Once I expressed the opinion that a default
of 99 steps was ridiculously many, but now it seems that it's only rather silly to say 99
and not 100. This image was taken with 20 images, and it's clear that only the closer half
is in focus.

The colour balance and contrast are also rather strange. This is a primarily white flower,
but it looks almost grey. That's particularly obvious looking from the front, where at
least most of the flower is in focus:

So what do I need to do? Optimize exposure and work out how many images to take. Yes, I
could take many more, but somehow that goes against the grain. It must be possible to
calculate the number of steps. But there are still too many unknowns.

One issue I still have with teevee is “tearing” of the displayed image on images that
pan (horizontally). That's a common complaint, but in my case it started after my upgrade
in June, where the software
stayed the same and the hardware got faster. No obvious reason why it should start tearing.

Went searching on the web and found the usual recommendations,
including VDPAU. Looking at my wrapper
scripts, I found that I didn't specify VDPAU anywhere. Try out with
explicit -vo vdpau and got:

Why that? In any case, it looked like a good time to upgrade my mplayer, not made
easier by the requirement to merge my own patches. But that went relatively easily. This
time I created a directory hierarchy /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer-local, copied the
contents of /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer to it, and then merged my own patches.
Surprisingly, it worked out of the box. And the total build time for mplayer was a
little over a minute, quite surprising with today's bloated ports.

And it worked. In particular, I didn't need to specify -vo vdpau: the tearing
went away without it. Is it invoked by default, perhaps?

It wasn't until we were watching TV in the evening that I discovered that the remote control
didn't work. But that almost seems normal; somehow LIRC seems to have it in for me.

While planting the Clematis “General Sikorski”, I
managed to break off one of the stems. Damn! So I cut off the bottom of the broken-off
piece, prepared it with scraping and hormone and planted it in a pot. Not surprisingly,
it's not looking very happy at the moment: